Rage

I rage at the senseless brutality of it. That America has tolerated similar incidents at movie theaters, churches and shopping malls in just the past twelve months, and really for decades, with no legitimate movement towards action only deepens the outrage.  

I rage at the White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, who tells America that there is a time to discuss gun control, but “Today is not the day.” There is NEVER a good time, not after Columbine (1999, 13 dead, 21 injured), not after Virginia Tech (2007, 32 dead, 17 wounded) not after Tucson  (2011, 5 dead, Congresswoman Gabby Giffords shot) , not after the Aurora massacre (July-2012, 12 dead, 58 wounded), not after the shooting at the Oak Creek Sikh Temple (Aug-2012, 6 dead, four wounded) and not after a summer in Chicago which saw an orgy of gun violence and human destruction.

We can only hope God holds a special place in a burning caldron in hell for those that who suggested with near pornographic obsession that if only some of those in the theatre in Aurora, or the temple in Oak Creek, or the school in Newtown had been armed, there would be less carnage. The criminally committed enthusiasts who spout such bile do not see the problem as 300 million guns, and a shrinking but ever more gun crazy, paranoid segment of the population. To them the solution is 400 million guns, make that 500 million(!), and an increasingly ramped up paranoia, overlaid with a more resolute hatred of our neighbor. Let the friggin’ bishop, the doctor, and the teacher get concealed-carry permits and the problem is solved for these prophets of destruction.

In the name of all of those who have been lost, including as President Obama so eloquently stated those “on street corners in Chicago”, I rage at this President who has completely capitulated to the not 40 million, but four million member NRA. The President has been a coward on Gun Safety and has neither attempted to set the NRA record of distortion and malevolence straight nor taken practical steps to stop the violence which has taken more American lives in 2012 than were lost in Iraq and Afghanistan and on 9-11 combined.

The 26 Democratic House candidates, and the sole Senate Democratic candidate, Joe Manchin, who was elected to the Senate in W-VA, who accepted NRA money are a HUGE part of the problem and represent just part of the corruption in our political soul which wastes so many lives. They do not carry the gun, but they make it possible for madmen, criminals, and terrorists to gain easy access so they may do so. The money these Democrats accept is the reason there are 300 million guns in America, campaign funds  provided by people that actively feed America’s  paranoia and the protracted bloodshed which we now endure.

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?cycle=2012&id=D000000082

This is not bipartisan money, or even Republican money. It is hard right conservative money and it is in league with the most regressive, reactionary elements of our body politic. $600,000 of the money spent in this election cycle by the NRA was donated by Karl Rove’s unregulated Super PAC, Crossroads GPS.  

In the 2012 cycle, 90% of direct candidate funding from the NRA went to Republican candidates for the house and the Senate, and 95% of Super PAC funding went to Republicans. In total the NRA contributed about $1.6 million, and of that amount only about $115,000 went to Democrats. Among other candidates the NRA supported Richard Mourdock, who infamously suggested that rape was both “horrible” and something “God intended to happen”. This is the company kept by those on the right, as well as Democrats who take blood money from the NRA and its corporate masters, the gun manufacturers who sell $5 billion in weapons in the US each year.

The NRA spent $40 Million on issue ads which claimed erroneously that the President:

·         Planned to ban use of firearms for home defense

·        Ban possession and manufacture of handguns

·        Close 90 percent of gun shops

·        Ban hunting ammunition

It is specifically these scurrilous and dishonest campaigns which prevent real action even in those cases where most Americans agree. For example, the five gun safety issues below where even the majority of polled NRA members agree:

·        Requiring criminal background checks on gun owners and gun shop employees

·        Prohibiting terrorist watch list members from acquiring guns

·         Mandating that gun-owners tell the police when their gun is stolen

·         Concealed carry permits should only be restricted to individuals who have completed a safety training course and are 21 and older

·        Concealed carry permits shouldn’t be given to perpetrators of violent misdemeanors or individuals arrested for domestic violence

There are these that say these measures would not have saved a one child in Newtown. Do they mean to suggest that no child died because these measures were not in place, or that the children that did die had lives without value? Do they mean to suggest that the particularly destructive hollow point bullets used in Newtown ought to be permitted for the fun of sport? Or that the right to own high powered automatic weapons with large capacity magazines supersedes, as my sister a teacher said, the right for children to be safe in their classroom?  

I rage at the mother who brought those high speed automatic weapons into that home. For the fulfillment of her obsessive hobby, two dozen children are dead. For as clearly as she is victim she is also villain in this episode of violence.

In this crime something has been breached, but does anyone really believe this will end anytime soon? It enrages me to consider how soon it will be before we will all once again hover around our TV, and listen to the endless litany. In 2014 or 2015 America will officially become a nation with more guns than citizens. America and her politicians have neither the political will nor the moral courage to address the obscene levels of weaponry in our midst. Our elected officials stand powerless in the face of a few million gun zealots blind to the suffering caused by their obsessive hobby. Why would it stop? America’s mental health care system is clearly inadequate to the severity of need. What will change in that regard to make the killing stop?

Mike Huckabee and Bryan Fischer tell us if God had not been removed from our schools this would not have happened. What rationale would these religious men use to explain the mass shooting at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin? I wonder. Wrong God, I suppose. Whatever religion Huckabee and Fischer espouse I condemn it for it appears neither humane or wise.

Victoria Jackson, stupid-as-a-f***ing-Rock-bubble-headed-comedienne, tweets that “… the Connecticut killer [was] just doing what abortionists do every day?” “When you forget the TEN COMMANDMENTS, people, THIS is what you get” she says. As someone responded on twitter, is this what the parents get? I dare you to stand in front of one of those Newtown parents and spill your sewage. Tell that to the parents of Victoria Soto, the 27 year old teacher, who placed her body between “her kids” and the killer and died so others could live. She is a repugnant coward, pond scum, in a moral universe.

Instead of any urgency to address the obscenity of what happened that is what we get. 30,000 will perish in 2012 because of gun violence, including suicides, accidents and murder. Those of us who wretch in the face of it have two choices:   Hopelessness or abomination. I chose neither. I rage at all of it, not certain of change, but without acceptance or tolerance for the destruction in our community, or the stupidity, selfishness, or greed that allows it to endure.